"There is no way we can avoid major cuts to balance the budget - and balance the budget is what we are going to do," Abele said during a public briefing on county departmental budget requests for 2012.

Milwaukee Common Council leaders Thursday endorsed building a $64.6 million modern streetcar line downtown, a move that brings the city closer than ever before to resolving a public transit debate that has raged for nearly 20 years.

With Thursday's vote, a majority of aldermen have now declared their support for building the 2.1-mile line pushed by Mayor Tom Barrett...

The council's Steering & Rules Committee acted despite warnings by city Comptroller W. Martin "Wally" Morics, who urged aldermen to slow down the process, and despite two utilities' fears that the planned route would add tens of millions of dollars in costs and delay the project....

From the streetcar article: "Modern streetcars resemble light rail vehicles. But, like old-fashioned streetcars, they typically run on rails laid in streets, draw power from overhead wires and operate in traffic." So... don't just worry about the money. Worry about the accidents.

92 comments:

The ONLY good thing building it will accomplish is the massive profits and kickbacks for Construction Contracts , Architect Fees and Bond issuance Fees that can be distributed among the friends and families of the localpoliticos.

Our light rail in Baltimore killed someone about a month ago.But the truth is I kind of like using it. The trains in Baltimore are pretty nice, only they don't hardly go anywhere; you have to get lucky.

I'm actually surprised that Madison never rebuilt trolleys to run around the square and up and down State Street. They used to be there, the tracks at least. They're gone now though or buried under layers of redevelopment.

]The] "planned route would add tens of millions of dollars in costs" due to the need to reloacte utilities?

What I'd like to know before proceeding is,

1. If relocating utilities does add these tens of millions of dollars in costs, who is going to pay them- the state, the county, the city?

2. Who's going to pay for the operating costs- state, county, or city?

3. The ridership estimate- "588,880 by 2015," according to the Journal Sentinel- looks like it was made up (would you buy a used car if the odometer "just happened to" read 58.888 miles?). Why should we believe it?

4 What are the costs and benefits of substitutiong buses on this route?

4a. If this is primarily for tourists, what if the buses were made to look like old-time trolleys (such as Chicago runs between Union Station and Navy Pier)?

4b. How do costs vs. benefits look if the buese are upgraded to bus rapid transit?

Of course, the dissonance in these two articles is partially explained by one is an operating budget and one a capital budget. I believe that the funds for the streetcar come from Federal Transportation funds that have been held for ages (why they weren't used for some serious street repair is beyond me). Holding the two stories up against each other looks like a no-brainer, but in fact, isn't. The substitution principle doesn't hold in this instance.

Killing the streetcar will NOT balance MKE County's budget. How it will affect the City's long-term operating budget is a very good question though.

That said, what I'm most concerned about is what the streetcar will lead to. I kind of liked Michael Cudahay's suggestion of moving it a block or two closer where destinations ARE so it can be used by visitors. The line isn't long enough to be of much use to downtown residents or offices...something that has continuously irked me in the streetcar debates all across the country.

TosaGuy said...They don't even know yet who will operate this system. The city is trying to get the Milwaukee County Transit System to do it, which belongs to the county that is $55 million in the hole.

I concur. If this is being paid for by Federal Funds I want Michele Obama to whack "The One" soundly upside the head and say " "honey, I am trying to run an anti-obesity campaign here trying to get people to be more active and you are wasting money on sh** like this? STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!

And it is also true for other city "community" projects, such as the Albuquerque Convention Center, f. ex.; it has never made money, and the reason has always been that it is too small and needs to be remodeled and added to. it's agift that keeps on giving - for someone.

Democrats love labor unions that run the trains. They can shut down the system in a hissy fits when things don't go their way. The unions extort their payoffs from taxpayers and payoff Democratic politicians with their campaign contributions and muscled supports. Democrats do not love trains per se, they love to be in power on taxpayers' dough for life so they don't have to work for a living.

People:O-ho the Milwalkee streetcar boondoogle is a-comin' down the street,Oh please let it be for me!O-ho the Milwalkee streetcar boondoogle is a-comin' down the street,I wish, I wish I knew what it could be!

First Voice:I got a sweet heart contract on my birthday.

Second Voice:In March I got a big change order.

Third Voice:And once I got some kickbacks from the material suppliers.

Fourth Voice:And the unions get the biggest cut of all.

People:O-ho the Milwalkee streetcar boondoogle is a-comin' nowAn unfunded mandate just for me.

Fifth Voice:It could be a prevailing wage agreement!

Sixth Voice:With lots slack!

Seventh Voice:Or cost plus!

Eighth Voice:Or it could be

People:Yes, it could beYes, you're right it surely could be

Eighth Voice:Somethin' special

People:Somethin' very, very special now

Eighth Voice:Just for me!

People:O-ho the Milwalkee streetcar boondoogle is a-comin' down the street.Oh, don't let him pass my door!O-ho the Milwalkee streetcar boondoogle is a-comin' down the streetI wish I knew what he was comin' for.

Ninth Voice:I got to speculate on real estate.

Tenth Voice:And I expect to retire next year.

Eleventh Voice:The city counsel will get their kickbacks.

Quartet:And Prosser will hang on the courthouse square.

Titus:O-ho the Milwalkee streetcar boondoogle ith a-comin' now, I don't know how I can ever wait to thee.It could be thumpin' for thumone who isNo relation but it could be thump'n thpethyul Just for me!

One of my favorite stories is about the light rail in Denver. It seems that one day, a fire department paramedic truck was rushing to a call red lights and siren, and went through a signal against the light into the path of an oncoming light rail train that was crossing the intersection.

The light rail train made the expected hash out of the paramedic truck. The responding Denver police officer then attempted to write the RTD light rail train operator a ticket for failing to yield to an emergency vehicle.

Oddly enough, it turned out that someone had actually foreseen the issue and the traffic code for Colorado actually had excepted the light rail train from the requirement to yield ( of course physics had more practically excepted the light rail long before ... ). The RTD and Denver PD went several rounds before they finally the city attorney dismissed the ticket and wrote a letter admonitioning PD for their stupidity.

That would be preferable to all those buses, IMO. Buses should go down Johnson/Gorham, or East/West Wash. Get them off State Street.

I actually agree with you here - diesel busses are too loud and big for a pedestrian mall. I think a State Street / Capitol loop automated tram would be much better, and from what we hear about what bus drivers there are paid, far less expensive to operate.

Um, I'm against government spending money as much as the next guy, etc, and think that most public transportation is a bondoggle. However:

can someone please tell me how MKE city not building a 64.4 million streetcar line will in any way balance the 55 million dollar shortfall in MKE county? I mean, one article is referencing shortfalls in the county budget, the streetcar is being referenced via the city. 'm not quite seeing how you get there from here. Or did I miss something important?

Shake & Bake:Yeah but their tracks are laid on the the inside lane of the street so they discharge passengers in the middle of the street and cars can't pass it on the right since they have to stop and wait for the passengers to walk to the sidewalk. So they are incredibly inefficient and frustrating to mororists who getstuck behind them.

If this thing gets built 'at grade' where it will compete with existing surtran (surface transportation, like pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, cars, trucks and buses) that will be the stupidest decision since chosing to vote for Obama (did I step on any toes?)

I use the streets of downtown San Francisco daily as a pedestrian, driver, and public transportation passenger. I concede that a streetcar may be fleetingly frustrating for a motorist who would rather not yield to discharging passeengers, but they are not generally "inefficient." They move many thousands of passengers around S.F. safely every day with far less congestion and pollutants than we would see if they did not exist.

Can you accruately quantify the pollution savings between a gas powered bus vs. an electricity powered trolley where the electricity is produced by coal?

Depending on the siting, coal-produced electricity can be less polluting than cars, even if they all produce the same amount of pollution. If your cars are in a basin where pollutants can be trapped -- LA, for example -- and your pollution is produced somewhere where it's vented more easily...

That said, I've no idea where most of the electricity used in SF is produced, or even how. I suspect some portion is nuclear or hydro.

txpxqa-The ROW is along existing City street easements. That's why the utilities will be required to relocate without any reimbursement from the City.Sofa-With the estimated cost of the relocation of the utilities alone, no private entity could compete.

That's a whole different issue, AJ, that I'm no expert in. (PG&E's electricity comes from a variety of sources, including nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar. I think coal-powered plants are a relatively small part of the mix, so a direct comparison isn't relevant.) I'm talking about what you breathe when you walk down the street.

Depends on how the easements are written.Albuquerque went to that some time ago with the predictable result that the utility companies insist on their new easements being on private property and not in the streets.Not good for the citizens and not really good for the City either in the long run, since the utilities, with secure easements on private property, do not have to be cooperative when the City wants to widen a street or do other changes. And the way the City has treated them over the years, they do not feel much like it either.

Meade, I hope you're not seriously suggesting that the article you linked supports the argument that streetcars cause accidents. That would just be silly. People drive safely and comfortably on the streetcar grooves all day, every day, all over the world. I'm watching it right now out my office window. It was the driver's sudden swerve that caused that accident, not the inanimate streetcar track that had been there for decades.

Sure Garage- if they build a 2.1 mile streetcar line, many will soon follow billions of new investment. That PDF said zip about the line's annual ridership nor its net income or loss. All it says is "watch all this great shit happen right after we build this thing".

Sure Garage- if they build a 2.1 mile streetcar line, many will soon follow billions of new investment.

"Fifty-five percent of all Portland’s centralbusiness district development has occurredwithin one block of the route in comparison to19 percent prior to 1997."

"• New development is occurring – 10,212 new housingunits and 5.4 million square feet of office, institutional,retail and hotel construction have been constructed withintwo blocks of the route, representing over $3.5 billion innew investment since 1997."

"Fifty-five percent of all Portland’s central business district development has occurred within one block of the route in comparison to 19 percent prior to 1997."

If you had gravy train running down your street, wouldn't you build there too? What that quote doesn't say is that OVERALL investment amounts or rates changed. So what if a business moved their development plan by a block? Sounds like a good chance for a politician's real estate buddies to get rich by tipping the development scale at taxpayer expense. Hope I'm wrong. We gonna put a bet on those projections, garage? 5 year time horizon?

And fresh off their success at keeping spending down in Minnesota, I expect the Republicans to join with a few Democrats to build the Vikings a new football stadium, because, you know, government has to live within its means.

Seattle shut is prized Waterfront Street Car some years ago because of unavoidable accidents. It was at grade its entire route, through a hot tourist area. Other reasons were given but that was the real one. Motormen and conductors (they were expensive units to operate) were volunteers from the ranks of county transit operators (bus drivers), who received special training and quite a bit of it to operate the street cars.

The motormen (street car operators) were finally given exemptions from the usual accident/termination rules because (1) accidents were just too inevitable (not by the motormen, by pedestrians and drivers thinking railed vehicles can be stopped on a dime and/or outrun; they cannot be), (2) Operators did not want to ruin their safety record, even with the leniency given Motormen, so they refused to volunteer for the Motorman position and (3) because of the accident inevitability, senior Operators refused to volunteer for Motorman and junior operators who did, or were forced to it by low seniority, were not even broken in yet on buses (that takes about 10 years, 5 just to get an idea that it isn't a car). Motorman staffing became problematic because the position was volunteer or forced picked work, based on seniority, so junior, marginally competent Operators, were forced or bamboozled (hey, this is cool, you can be a street car operator with the romance of early America and admiration of tourists) to the street car because the seniors were not fool enough to pick it.

Now a new entity is running at-grade light rail through the area of town where children and adults typically play in the streets from sundown to sunup. All so news people can get to the airport from downtown without traffic (literally true, local news got it going for themselves), and of course they don't use it because the hoi poloi do. Using county Operators, volunteers picking work only if they want to.

But these are light trains now, multiple cars, not single street cars. You won't see it in the news but imagine .... Training? Accidents? Some of the latter do reach the news. Rail cannot stop quickly. Throw full brake and the wheels lock, throwing sparks, wearing wheels flat and deforming rail (now need [taxpayer-paid] replacement), while the train flies down the track. On heavy rail, a fully loaded mile long train traveling 60 takes miles to stop after full brake application. Even a standard 40' bus at 20 travels far on dynamited brakes (I forget the exact feet but recall it as astonishing) before it stops. (This fact gives rise to the 2 second following distance rule, which is crucial to safe vehicle operation: 2 seconds of travel for every 10 feet of vehicle one is driving.) Stopping distance increases exponentially with speed even with full brake application.

Very few people know how to drive. Very few care to know. Public transit operators learn that they have to drive for everyone around them as well as for themselves and their passengers. If they don't learn that, they are out one way or another.

The 2007 American Community Survey found that, since the 2000 census, the number of Portland-area residents who say they usually bicycle to work grew from about 6,800 to 15,900. But the number who say they take transit to work declined from 58,600 to 57,900. The number who go to work by car (not counting taxis) grew from 664,300 to 730,500. This means that Portland roads have about 60,000 more cars during rush hour, but the region has put most of its transportation dollars into light rail and streetcars that carry no more people.

A lot of blame for this can go to the city’s focus on light rail, whose enormous costs have cannibalized bus service and thus reduced total transit service. In particular, those who support transit as a god-send for the working poor should note that this substitution of large, inexpensive bus networks for more yuppie-friendly trains on narrow routes shifts transit away from the poor to white collar users.

…coerciveness is a fundamental part of the livability campaign, as shown by Portland, Oregon, whose official objective (see table 1.2) is to allow rush-hour traffic to grow to near-gridlock levels (â€level of service Fâ€) on many major freeways and arterials. Besides diverting federal highway money into light rail instead of things that will actually relieve congestion, much of the money that Portland does spend on roads goes into â€œtraffic calming,â€ a euphemism for â€œcongestion buildingâ€ which consists of putting barriers in roads, speed humps, narrowing streets, and turning auto lanes into exclusive bike lanes.

Beyond the moral and constitutional question of whether government should have the right to intrude into peopleâ€™s lives is the more practical question of whether the benefits of such intrusions justify their costs. In the case of Portland, the costs include a nearly twelve-fold increase in the costs of congestion between 1982 and 2005, the more than $2 billion spent on light rail, and nearly $2 billion spent on subsidies to transit-oriented developments. Meanwhile, the benefits include a lot of New York Times articles making Portlanders feeling smug about themselves, but not much else except for the lucky (or politically connected) few getting the subsidies.

Ampersand - Are you an idiot? We aren't talkinng about nostalgia and 18th century artifacts. We're talking about modern light-rail transportation of the sort that runs in cities all over the world. I said operators of these vehicles obey the law more than car drivers. You said a catastropic storm more than 60 years ago disrupted rail service. ?!? Get a clue or STFU.

That's exactly what you're talking about,you fucking toad.Almost every city in this country was served by streetcars, They're gone!Low ridership, high maintenance costs,limited routing options.The only cities that have running streetcars have them because they didn't tear up theirinfrastructure.

Even trolley busses couldn't compete against busses.

You want trolleys? Go get the Walther's catalog, buy a nice one in HO. You'll have something to occupy your time down in your basement.

Over 150,000 passengers ride streetcars like this every day in San Francisco. I have no idea whether streetcars make sense for Milwaukee, but to suggest it isn't a viable modern technology is just asinine.